Arthur stared at Vira, taking in the positions of everyone around him. He was perfectly surrounded, with no avenue of escape, not that he could attempt it right now anyway, with the state of his body. The naked hostility in everyone's eyes was clear as day, and he could tell they were itching for violence. Maverick, unfortunately, seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, so there was no help coming from there.

  Wovan, of course, chose that exact moment to teleport two of her missing bodies— bodies he’d thought had died in their last battle— directly onto his lap. Two of David's colleagues sent magic flying at him, a bolt of ice and a blade of wind. Thankfully, David wasn’t on such a hair trigger and used his own bit of magic to stop the attackers from reaching him.

  “Ron and Carla. That’s an extra week in the tannery for you two,” David said, glaring at his subordinates. The people in question looked suitably chastised, though Arthur didn’t miss the glare they threw in his direction, like their punishment was somehow his fault. Vira didn’t miss it either, and she returned their glares with one that seemingly contained a psychic attack, at least going by how the troublemakers' knees buckled.

  Arthur missed some of the byplay. He was too distracted by his pet spider, or rather, by what she’d decided to bring back with her. Sitting on his lap was a glittering green orb the size of his skull with flecks of black sprinkled across it. Wovan had brought his Esmerald's monster core, dug out from his still-warm corpse, along with his heart. With the bodies she'd returned with, that only left two spiders unaccounted for. A quick inspection of his connection with them showed him that this time, they were actually dead.

  At her current rate of recovery, it meant he would have to wait twenty hours before she was fully operational again. Or would it only be two hours? Did Wovan's dead bodies recover at a rate according to the total health she shared across all her bodies, or in accordance with only her destroyed form's healthpool? There was nothing for it but to wait and find out. If Vira and her underlings didn't end up killing him in the next few minutes, that was.

  "That Soul stone proves you weren't lying about killing Esmerald, at least," Vira interrupted his musings. "The question, however, remains. Why are your injuries so minor? As large as your soul is, its density suggests you're less than half as strong as Maverick. That's besides the point, though. Vira paused and looked around at her gathered underlings.

  "These men and women here make up for an eleventh of humanity's remaining population on Haadran. Where in the world did you come from? I can see that you're not corrupted. Are there more survivors out there?"

  Arthur attempted to speak and coughed up a mouthful of blood. He'd somehow forgotten that his lungs were still terribly damaged.

  Vira cursed and hobbled over towards him, acting on her part, Arthur was sure. There was no way a level 293 healer suffered from the effects of old age.

  "My apologies for not healing you, young man," Vira murmured, placing a wrinkled hand on his chest. "While we don't know each other, and you're entirely too suspicious, I sincerely doubt you wish us any harm."

  The old healer channelled her energy into his chest and throat, focusing on his lungs and the half-healed wound the Corpse puppet had given him. Arthur tried to track her healing, but once again, she was shielding her magic from his prying eyes.

  "I've dealt with the worst of your injuries, so you're no longer at risk of dropping dead. The rest of them pose no risk to your life, but you won't be healing your transfused flesh at your current skill level. I've begun the process of healing the true damage on your eye by puppeteering your healing magic. Either it'll conclude on its own if you're lucky, or it won't" Vira said, stepping away from him. "I can finish the job, or teach you how to do it yourself, as soon as I know who you are."

  She'd puppeteered his healing magic. Was such a thing even possible? His throbbing eye certainly felt like it'd gotten better. Arthur sighed. There was no bullshitting his way out of this mess. "Can't we wait for Maverick to wake up?"

  "We can, yes, but it'll take a while. I've put him into a magically induced form of REM sleep to ensure he heals completely," Vira replied. "I know the man, though. There's no way in the nine hells he asked you about anything important. He was gone for less than half a day. That's hardly enough time to get his usual drinking done, never mind get to know someone."

  "When you put it like that, I can't really say anything," Arthur grudgingly agreed. "I was resting somewhere in the Daggerfall mountain range. I'm not sure of the exact location, but it took me a few days of travel to get there. That's when Maverick decided it was a good idea to waltz up and wake me from my much-needed nap."

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Less than a minute later, Samuel was descending from the skies on his massive wyvern. You probably saw the thunderstorm he summoned. Damn thing must have been visible from hundreds of miles out. The story from there went about as well as you'd expect."

  "No, Arthur, it didn't," Vira replied. Arthur couldn't remember giving her his name. "Maverick knows not to engage with Samuel ever since he lost his mount. It's suicide, and the man's the most stubborn survivor I know. Today, he didn't listen to reason, except somehow, he didn't die." Vira gestured at the objects on Arthur's lap. "Instead, he returned to us with the strangest man I've ever met, human, but not quite, and a spider that frankly terrifies me. And let's not forget the Soul stone and heart practically oozing corruption.

  The old woman shook her head. “I can't deny the reality of what I see. The sight of one of our most hated foes, finally vanquished, yet I cannot understand how it was done. You are the answers to questions I fear to ask, hope I dare not feel.”

  “Well, if you can answer some of my questions first, things will hopefully clear up,” Arthur replied. “I learned a little following Maverick and Samuel’s conversation before the fight, but what exactly happened to this planet. Tell me about the history of your world.”

  Vira looked at him consideringly. “Spoken like someone born beyond its borders.” She didn't follow through with the accusation, but the way David's hands immediately drifted to his dagger told Arthur all he needed to know about how these humans felt about aliens.

  Vira took a deep breath and began. “I am not much of a historian, and the little I know has been distorted by the passage of time. Much of what we know about the past has, in fact, been passed down in the form of a cradle song, used to soothe crying children.”

  “Some fifteen-odd millennia ago, the heavens were broken. The wrath of some vengeful deity, punishment for our sins, perhaps. I know not why it happened, but fifteen thousand years ago, our world was changed forever."

  "I am one of the fortunate few who was able to read the tomes locked away in the Silverglade Palace, seven centuries ago, before they were all burned away. I wonder if what they contained is truth, or the fanciful lies of kings who speak of grandeur that never was. The books told the story of an empire, one that spanned the very heavens, consisting of hundreds of worlds beyond our own. We were merely a cog of a much greater machine. It spoke of races I've never seen and species beyond the most expressive child's imagination. It painted a wonderful picture. A time when you weren't limited by your birthplace but only by your will."

  "Heaven's breaking destroyed everything. It wasn't fast or sudden, but it was damning all the same, a gradual decline that spelt the end of an age. Worlds went dim, the heavens' corruption spreading and tainting them. The connections between us were cut as a means of safeguarding those that remained."

  Arthur was listening with rapt attention. It was fascinating to hear how the people of Haadran interpreted the realm failing to evolve and falling into corruption, how fantastical it had become. Fascinating and sobering. This would ultimately be Earth's fate unless something was done to battle the spreading corruption in the Myopan realm.

  "Five thousand years ago, when our world was meant to grow into its next stage of development, that same corruption finally reached us in full. Our finest moment, what was meant to be the revival of our planet, instead rang the knell of our end. Our races declined. The elves' already abysmal birth rate simply ceased to be, and humans succumbed to old age far before their time."

  Vira's speech had taken on the cadence of a storyteller, melancholic and filled with regret. Everyone gathered was hanging on to her every word, even though Arthur was certain they'd heard it many times before.

  "Nine hundred years ago, tired of all the unfair oppression humanity had suffered under elven rule, Maverick, the stubborn fool, led the armies of man in a war that would span the next three decades, one that claimed the lives of nearly half our already reduced population. 290 years later, corruption would finally come for our people. It targeted the young first, making mindless monsters of our precious children."

  Vira was staring directly at Arthur, but he knew she was looking at something else, trapped in some distant memory of the past.

  "The war had already diminished us; it culled our numbers and killed off the weak. People blamed Maverick for it, but the only reason so many of us remain untainted today is because of how many died in that very war. I don't know how, or why, but the corruption was somehow made weaker with fewer victims to work with."

  The old woman turned to look at Maverick's sleeping form, the weight of time and memory making her look truly ancient. "Sometimes, I wonder if that's why he started the stupid war. To give us a fighting chance."

  "293 years ago, however, we made a fatal mistake. Reinhart and Elissriya, king and queen of the elves, decided to sire a child, the first elven child to be born in over four millennia. It took more magic than the planet has ever seen and probably ever will, resources that could found a nation, the kinds of rituals that were more miracles than science."

  "Reinhart and Elissriya set out to challenge the extinction of their species; they pit their stubborn desire against the will of a corrupted world."

  The temperature around Vira cooled as she lost control of a smidgen of her aura. Or was that coming from him? Arthur wasn't sure. This was the history of a fallen people, told by one of its oldest members, a woman who had lived through it all. Ether itself seemed to bear witness.

  "291 years ago, they succeeded." Vira was whispering now, almost talking to herself. "In the pain of childbirth, at her most vulnerable, Elissriya finally succumbed to corruption. Her son, Shylo, corrupted Avatar of Haadran, broken puppet of heaven, was born. At long last, corruption finally entered the heart of the Silverglade Palace, and it is from there that Shylo has ruled since."

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